As stated numerous times on here, IMHO Northern Ireland’s greatest advantage (long since squandered) and to a lesser extent the republic’s was (is...
?) how far behind the curve of modernity we are (were). When plans for new-fangled shiny baubles such as ‘hypermarkets’, retail parks, drive-thrus and MASSIVE pubs were being submitted by developers all we had to do was send out a few fact finders to places where such things are popular and uncontrolled e.g.
the USA and Canada (and Belgium) and to places where they are controlled like the Netherlands. “So troops, what did you like about the motorway-retail park-Parkinglotopolis of Alberta, Canada?” “well, you could get around the place wile handy, when it wasn’t rush hour” “and what did you not like about it?” “I wanted to slash my wrists from the boredom after 4 days, there’s few wee shops or parks and hardly any nice old districts to walk about in and everything looks the same, but in a modern way, not like an old city way..
.” St Stephen’s Green, Dublin Edmonton Suburbs, Alberta But instead we just embrace these ideas and now we have places like Cookstown and Ballymena; They all have retail parks close to the town centre but not close enough to merit cross pollination of footfall. So the towns get lots of traffic but the centres get only a fraction of the footfall.
Another idea we’ve embraced is that of tacking-on estates to the periphery of a town and hoping it won’t make traffic worse (which .
